You can't get mugged on the internet. You can't be coerced on the internet. Criminals need YOUR COOPERATION.
Well, that is almost true. With certain Windows exploits, you can be doing perfectly normal things on your PC and still become infected. You can even have a firewall and anti-virus/anti-spam spam filter.
Unless, of course, you think that "cooperation with criminals" means "I don't digitally arm my computer to the hilt with every possible kind of protection, down-to-the-second patches, and anti-hacker voodooo ninjas." Just because my house is not surrounded by a moat filled with hungry pirahnna, does not somehow mean that I am cooperating with thieves. Next you're going to blame women for being raped...
Things like blog comments that have little monetary value to their creators shouldn't be protected indefinitely.
Sometimes, a thing will have unrecognized value (even by its creator/author) until years later, when due to other developments or changes in environment, an invention or written word will suddenly seem brilliant or extremely prescient.
In those cases, though rare, do you expect the creator to be able to somehow regain ownership of the thing he/she had previously released to the public? Or is it now irrevocably public domain? "Better luck next time, bub."
Very minor, but... the bill was revised twice after the original, although the Slashdot article link only points to the original. The latest version is here. Minor differences.
(2) The attorney general shall award the Community Conscious Internet Provider designation to an Internet service provider that:
(a) completes an application created by the attorney general; and
(b) agrees to:
(i) prohibit its customers by contract from publishing any prohibited communication;
(ii) remove or prevent access to any prohibited communication published by or accessed using the Internet service provider's service within a reasonable time after the Internet service provider learns of the prohibited communication;
(iii) comply with any court order concerning the removal of a prohibited communication;
(iv) maintain a record for two years following its allocation of an IP address of the IP address, the date and time of the allocation, and the customer to whom the IP address is allocated;
(v) cooperate with any law enforcement agency by providing records sufficient to identify a customer if the law enforcement agency requests the information and supplies reasonable proof that a crime has been committed using the Internet service provider's service;
(vi) respond to the attorney general, other law enforcement agency, or customer who complains of a prohibited communication published by or accessible using the Internet service provider's service; and
(vii) provide information concerning the Internet service provider's compliance with this section promptly upon request by the attorney general.
(3) An Internet service provider that is awarded the Community Conscious Internet Provider designation shall require its customers to enter into an agreement providing that:
(a) publishing a prohibited communication is prohibited; and
(b) the Internet service provider will:
(i) remove or prevent access to a prohibited communication of which it is aware;
(ii) comply with a court order ordering the removal of a prohibited communication;
(iii) maintain a record for two years following its allocation of an IP address of the IP address, the date and time of the allocation, and the customer to whom the IP address is allocated;
(iv) cooperate with any law enforcement agency by providing records sufficient to identify a customer if the law enforcement agency requests the information and supplies reasonable proof that a crime has been committed using the Internet service provider's service; and
(v) respond to the attorney general, other law enforcement agency, or customer who complains of a prohibited communication published by or accessible using the Internet service provider's service.
Emphasis added. This is partially about filtering "objectionable" content (though the ISP can wait until after it's been reported to them), but they also have to track IP numbers for specific customers and store that information for up to two years. This is about law enforcement....
I know the folks over at EngenderHealth, Population Council, and similar nonprofits who work in sexual and reproductive health topics... sometimes have trouble with overzealous anti-spam filters marking messages as porn just because they're talking about sex, genitalia, etc. Tough to get work done when your emails keep getting dumped in the spam bucket.
Agreed. This is absurd. What's next -- will she demand a lock on her bedroom door that her parents cannot have keys for?
You have no right to privacy from your parents while you live under their roof, eat their food, and depend on their money. Privacy, if you have it, is a privilege. Get over it. Especially at age 7.
Well, if you RTFA, it has nothing to do with insider knowledge. Instead:
"The mechanism that permits the Church of Scientology (and others) such broad access and discretion is called the Verified Rights Owner ("VeRO") Program. Membership in VeRO is obtained simply by submitting a form to eBay explaining that you are an Intellectual Property rights holder.... It should come as little surprise that VeRO members routinely overreach, as the cost of challenging a listing removal is almost always prohibitive.... The VeRO Program makes a great deal of sense for some types of listings -- counterfeit Rolexes and Gucci handbags appear on eBay with such frequent regularity that those companies would be hard pressed to handle these trademark violations any other way."
Basically, the original summary is misleading: lots of companies (e.g. copyright/trademark holders) have access to directly delete auctions on eBay. The Slyentologists are only one of many (but they're fun to pick on!).
Isn't advertising the "service fee" you pay for? My ISP doesn't advertise to me while I use the Internet, although some companies have tried that (remember NetZero?).
If you truly and literally spent five years not helping anyone, your charity is a scam. This hardly means that all charities are scams; most are not.
As for connecting donors to recipients: sure, that's a nice idea, except for:
Economies of scale. You get ten thousand donors together to buy food, supplies, etc., then you can get a lot more solution for your money.
Addressing root problems. Sure, a thirsty family in Africa might be able to buy safe drinking water for a month on the $20 you send them. But it would be better if a bunch of people could collectively send over $2500 and build a new, clean-water well. Or if somebody organized the money together and built dozens of clean wells all over the region. There are tons of problems like this.
The problem isn't always money. Sometimes the problem is education. Or identifying problems in service delivery. Or advocating for change in government policies. How would you solve these problems by sending your money to the needy people?
Sometimes direct support works well. Kiva has a really interesting approach that seems to be successful, for example. But it's hardly the answer to every problem that nonprofits try to solve.
Thanks for asking. No, we don't have any plans specifically for data warehousing (though that's something we are looking into). Our shared hosting plans aren't meant for rsyncing. You'd have to get a dedicated server (or a "virtual dedicated" account, which we began offering this week). But I don't know if it would be cost-effective for your needs, probably costing over $75/month no matter how you slice it.
Well, maybe you shouldn't go with a "traditional" hosting plan. Find a web hosting company like us (or, frankly, many others) who let you add bandwidth to your hosting account on a monthly basis. So in theory, you could have an account with 5gb of disk space and 10 terabytes of bandwidth...
Most small business sites will never use even 100gb of data. We offer shared hosting at ~$15/month for 200GB disk, 2tb bandwidth, and of our customers who use it, most could downgrade to cheaper accounts ($8? $4.50?) without a problem**. Yahoo knows this about its own customers, too, so this is likely a gimmick to give the impression of a "deal" while knowing most people won't actually consume much. Also note this quote from Yahoo's unlimited email FAQ: "The purpose of unlimited storage isn't to provide an online storage warehouse. Usage that suggests this approach gets flagged by Yahoo! Business Email's anti-abuse controls." Or, elsewhere in the help system:
So what does "unlimited" mean, really?
Disk space:
You can now create as large a site as you like (you won't face an upper limit, or "ceiling"), but we will place some constraints on how fast you can grow. In other words, you can add as much content as you want, but maybe not all at once. The vast majority of our customers' sites grow at rates well within our rules, however, and will not be impacted by this constraint.
Data transfer:
In most cases, if you use our service appropriately, visitors to your web site will be able to download and view as much content from your site as they like. However, in certain circumstances, our server processing power, server memory, or anti-abuse controls could limit downloads from your site.
You can also upload as much as content as you like each month, subject only to the rules that control how fast your site can grow (see above).
OK. What exactly is that speed of growth?
(**Yes, I realize that some Arrow Bay customers are reading this. Check your disk and bandwidth usage: if it's always significantly under what you're paying for, consider downgrading to the next package for your next billing cycle. Seriously.)
For what it's worth... by starting off web design projects with Yahoo's reset.css and fonts.css (customized if necessary), by relying on cross-browser JavaScript frameworks like jQuery for any JS that modifies the DOM, and by being really careful about creating clean code that's easy to debug, I've reduced my IE5/6/7-specific coding headaches down to maybe 20-25 lines of IE-specific CSS.
I don't do that for every site, but this process makes cross-browser differences only mildly irritating, rather than showstopping.
This is kind of like the difference between blue-collar and white-collar crime. If I physically break into your house and steal a thousand dollars of property, it's blue-collar. If I intentionally falsify tax documents and earnings statements in order to pump up my company's stock value, then cash out for millions of dollars while you and the other stockholders are left holding the bag, it's white-collar.
Both are crimes. The first appears more "meatspace" than the second, but the consequences of the second are much broader and longer lasting -- even in the physical world. If I lose thousands of dollars in investments, it's as good as you stealing it out of my house. If I die because you destroy my medical data, leading to some kind of fatal treatment, you might as well have shot me. And even if nobody would have died, there are still other Very Bad Consequences, like patients becoming developing new conditions as the result of wrong medication (possibly leading to lifelong problems). And there is the small issue of all the MedCo employees losing their jobs, and thousands of hospitals and clinics become snarled up in treatment schedules. This one little thing could easily impact millions of people overnight.
I agree that planting a logic bomb is not the same thing as shooting somebody. It is a different thing; in fact, it's a new kind of sinister that was not even possible a hundred years ago. But it might be just as bad as "going postal."
Maybe Negroponte should just pull off the gloves and make a deal with Wal-Mart and Costco to carry OLPC's. Use the profits to donate machines to developing nations.
Not a bad idea. It is the same business model used by DKT International. They distribute condoms and other contraceptives in poor countries to people who would like fewer kids, but can't afford contraception themselves. (Let's not have the "why not just have less sex" discussion -- you first, okay?) DKT also works on HIV and AIDS prevention/treatment. And they were originally subsidized by Adam & Eve, an American sex toy company whose profits mostly go to DKT (and PSI, a similar organization). I'm not kidding.
Weird. Maybe it's an OS thing -- I tested Firefox on Mac OS 10.4.11.
You also need to run it several times and average the scores. 197 versus 202 is basically the same score in these tests. 202 versus 518 is a more significant difference.
Speaking as someone who is currently in medical school, allow me to put forth the falsifiable claim that you don't know what you're talking about.
As the spouse of an M.D. who also has an M.S. in nutrition, I totally support your comments.
However, I will add that most medical schools teach very little about nutrition -- only the rudiments. Part of this is due to an inherent emphasis on treatment rather than prevention. When she was in med school (and already had her MS) she saw a number of patients who desperately needed nutritional counseling if their medical regimen was going to have lasting effect. But it wasn't part of the treatment.
After having read the majority of the threads it seems that everyone on Slashdot thinks they are a nutritional expert. Somehow I don't think that is the case.
No, it isn't the case. The truth is that everyone in America and on the Internet is a nutritional expert. It's not just on Slashdot.
Nutrition and medicine are some of those interesting fields where people feel empowered to share their knowledge, even if it is inaccurate. This happens in every field, of course, but you are far less likely to hear Joe Simple claiming to understand nuclear physics or assembly language than to understand nutrition or healthcare. Just yesterday I overhead a couple of geniuses talking about why high-protein diets make you lose weight: because protein actually breaks down fat in your blood, so you poop it out faster! No, really. They had read this somewhere. There was scientific research and everything.
And sadly, they probably had read it, which is the other problem with nutrition/healthcare in the U.S.: almost anyone can say anything, no matter how true it is. Some years back I came across the web site of a supposed M.D. who claimed that jumping up and down on a trampoline would cure AIDS by realigning the vertical axis of cells in your body....
I've heard that too. But my local public library has an early VHS copy of it, which still has that segment in it. It's pretty funny because it shows how silly Big Bird is -- not how racist he is. Bird is supposed to be five years old; you can't call him racist at that age.
Great anecdote, thanks. There are far more of that kind of person in the world, than there are otherwise. And many of them are intelligent, hardworking people -- but totally unaware of the possibilities of the Internet (for good or bad). There's already one reply to your message indicating that your acquaintance is a moron and should be sterilized for the good of humanity, but that's exactly the kind of rhetoric that will discount us. No, he's not a moron. He just has a zillion other things to worry about. We need to have simple explanations that non-Slashdotters can understand.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there *are* other OSes besides Windows that you can run more safely on an internet connected computer.
True, but the average person is going to be running Windows -- and even with reasonable precautions, could still become infected.
You can't get mugged on the internet. You can't be coerced on the internet. Criminals need YOUR COOPERATION.
Well, that is almost true. With certain Windows exploits, you can be doing perfectly normal things on your PC and still become infected. You can even have a firewall and anti-virus/anti-spam spam filter.
Unless, of course, you think that "cooperation with criminals" means "I don't digitally arm my computer to the hilt with every possible kind of protection, down-to-the-second patches, and anti-hacker voodooo ninjas." Just because my house is not surrounded by a moat filled with hungry pirahnna, does not somehow mean that I am cooperating with thieves. Next you're going to blame women for being raped...
Things like blog comments that have little monetary value to their creators shouldn't be protected indefinitely.
Sometimes, a thing will have unrecognized value (even by its creator/author) until years later, when due to other developments or changes in environment, an invention or written word will suddenly seem brilliant or extremely prescient.
In those cases, though rare, do you expect the creator to be able to somehow regain ownership of the thing he/she had previously released to the public? Or is it now irrevocably public domain? "Better luck next time, bub."
It's sad that a bunch of anime nerds can beat out a full team of PhD holding Google Employees.
What makes you think there aren't any PhD-holding Google employees among your anime nerds?
Very minor, but... the bill was revised twice after the original, although the Slashdot article link only points to the original. The latest version is here. Minor differences.
Quoting from the actual bill:
(2) The attorney general shall award the Community Conscious Internet Provider designation to an Internet service provider that:
(3) An Internet service provider that is awarded the Community Conscious Internet Provider designation shall require its customers to enter into an agreement providing that:
Emphasis added. This is partially about filtering "objectionable" content (though the ISP can wait until after it's been reported to them), but they also have to track IP numbers for specific customers and store that information for up to two years. This is about law enforcement....
I know the folks over at EngenderHealth, Population Council, and similar nonprofits who work in sexual and reproductive health topics... sometimes have trouble with overzealous anti-spam filters marking messages as porn just because they're talking about sex, genitalia, etc. Tough to get work done when your emails keep getting dumped in the spam bucket.
Agreed. This is absurd. What's next -- will she demand a lock on her bedroom door that her parents cannot have keys for?
You have no right to privacy from your parents while you live under their roof, eat their food, and depend on their money. Privacy, if you have it, is a privilege. Get over it. Especially at age 7.
Well, if you RTFA, it has nothing to do with insider knowledge. Instead:
"The mechanism that permits the Church of Scientology (and others) such broad access and discretion is called the Verified Rights Owner ("VeRO") Program. Membership in VeRO is obtained simply by submitting a form to eBay explaining that you are an Intellectual Property rights holder. ... It should come as little surprise that VeRO members routinely overreach, as the cost of challenging a listing removal is almost always prohibitive. ... The VeRO Program makes a great deal of sense for some types of listings -- counterfeit Rolexes and Gucci handbags appear on eBay with such frequent regularity that those companies would be hard pressed to handle these trademark violations any other way."
eBay has more info about their VeRO program.
Basically, the original summary is misleading: lots of companies (e.g. copyright/trademark holders) have access to directly delete auctions on eBay. The Slyentologists are only one of many (but they're fun to pick on!).
Isn't advertising the "service fee" you pay for? My ISP doesn't advertise to me while I use the Internet, although some companies have tried that (remember NetZero?).
If that's true, then you need to report it to the Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Alliance, as well as to Charity Navigator -- groups which track the return-on-investment aspects of charitable organizations.
If you truly and literally spent five years not helping anyone, your charity is a scam. This hardly means that all charities are scams; most are not.
As for connecting donors to recipients: sure, that's a nice idea, except for:
Sometimes direct support works well. Kiva has a really interesting approach that seems to be successful, for example. But it's hardly the answer to every problem that nonprofits try to solve.
Thanks for asking. No, we don't have any plans specifically for data warehousing (though that's something we are looking into). Our shared hosting plans aren't meant for rsyncing. You'd have to get a dedicated server (or a "virtual dedicated" account, which we began offering this week). But I don't know if it would be cost-effective for your needs, probably costing over $75/month no matter how you slice it.
Well, maybe you shouldn't go with a "traditional" hosting plan. Find a web hosting company like us (or, frankly, many others) who let you add bandwidth to your hosting account on a monthly basis. So in theory, you could have an account with 5gb of disk space and 10 terabytes of bandwidth...
Most small business sites will never use even 100gb of data. We offer shared hosting at ~$15/month for 200GB disk, 2tb bandwidth, and of our customers who use it, most could downgrade to cheaper accounts ($8? $4.50?) without a problem**. Yahoo knows this about its own customers, too, so this is likely a gimmick to give the impression of a "deal" while knowing most people won't actually consume much. Also note this quote from Yahoo's unlimited email FAQ: "The purpose of unlimited storage isn't to provide an online storage warehouse. Usage that suggests this approach gets flagged by Yahoo! Business Email's anti-abuse controls." Or, elsewhere in the help system:
OK. What exactly is that speed of growth?
(**Yes, I realize that some Arrow Bay customers are reading this. Check your disk and bandwidth usage: if it's always significantly under what you're paying for, consider downgrading to the next package for your next billing cycle. Seriously.)
For what it's worth... by starting off web design projects with Yahoo's reset.css and fonts.css (customized if necessary), by relying on cross-browser JavaScript frameworks like jQuery for any JS that modifies the DOM, and by being really careful about creating clean code that's easy to debug, I've reduced my IE5/6/7-specific coding headaches down to maybe 20-25 lines of IE-specific CSS.
I don't do that for every site, but this process makes cross-browser differences only mildly irritating, rather than showstopping.
And that's why I knew somebody would ask that very question, relatively quickly....
This is kind of like the difference between blue-collar and white-collar crime. If I physically break into your house and steal a thousand dollars of property, it's blue-collar. If I intentionally falsify tax documents and earnings statements in order to pump up my company's stock value, then cash out for millions of dollars while you and the other stockholders are left holding the bag, it's white-collar.
Both are crimes. The first appears more "meatspace" than the second, but the consequences of the second are much broader and longer lasting -- even in the physical world. If I lose thousands of dollars in investments, it's as good as you stealing it out of my house. If I die because you destroy my medical data, leading to some kind of fatal treatment, you might as well have shot me. And even if nobody would have died, there are still other Very Bad Consequences, like patients becoming developing new conditions as the result of wrong medication (possibly leading to lifelong problems). And there is the small issue of all the MedCo employees losing their jobs, and thousands of hospitals and clinics become snarled up in treatment schedules. This one little thing could easily impact millions of people overnight.
I agree that planting a logic bomb is not the same thing as shooting somebody. It is a different thing; in fact, it's a new kind of sinister that was not even possible a hundred years ago. But it might be just as bad as "going postal."
Maybe Negroponte should just pull off the gloves and make a deal with Wal-Mart and Costco to carry OLPC's. Use the profits to donate machines to developing nations.
Not a bad idea. It is the same business model used by DKT International. They distribute condoms and other contraceptives in poor countries to people who would like fewer kids, but can't afford contraception themselves. (Let's not have the "why not just have less sex" discussion -- you first, okay?) DKT also works on HIV and AIDS prevention/treatment. And they were originally subsidized by Adam & Eve, an American sex toy company whose profits mostly go to DKT (and PSI, a similar organization). I'm not kidding.
Note that the Adam & Eve link is NSFW.
Weird. Maybe it's an OS thing -- I tested Firefox on Mac OS 10.4.11.
You also need to run it several times and average the scores. 197 versus 202 is basically the same score in these tests. 202 versus 518 is a more significant difference.
If you run the MooTools Slickspeed tests in different browsers, you find something interesting:
jQuery also claims to be the most accurate, though who knows for sure.
Speaking as someone who is currently in medical school, allow me to put forth the falsifiable claim that you don't know what you're talking about.
As the spouse of an M.D. who also has an M.S. in nutrition, I totally support your comments.
However, I will add that most medical schools teach very little about nutrition -- only the rudiments. Part of this is due to an inherent emphasis on treatment rather than prevention. When she was in med school (and already had her MS) she saw a number of patients who desperately needed nutritional counseling if their medical regimen was going to have lasting effect. But it wasn't part of the treatment.
After having read the majority of the threads it seems that everyone on Slashdot thinks they are a nutritional expert. Somehow I don't think that is the case.
No, it isn't the case. The truth is that everyone in America and on the Internet is a nutritional expert. It's not just on Slashdot.
Nutrition and medicine are some of those interesting fields where people feel empowered to share their knowledge, even if it is inaccurate. This happens in every field, of course, but you are far less likely to hear Joe Simple claiming to understand nuclear physics or assembly language than to understand nutrition or healthcare. Just yesterday I overhead a couple of geniuses talking about why high-protein diets make you lose weight: because protein actually breaks down fat in your blood, so you poop it out faster! No, really. They had read this somewhere. There was scientific research and everything.
And sadly, they probably had read it, which is the other problem with nutrition/healthcare in the U.S.: almost anyone can say anything, no matter how true it is. Some years back I came across the web site of a supposed M.D. who claimed that jumping up and down on a trampoline would cure AIDS by realigning the vertical axis of cells in your body....
I've heard that too. But my local public library has an early VHS copy of it, which still has that segment in it. It's pretty funny because it shows how silly Big Bird is -- not how racist he is. Bird is supposed to be five years old; you can't call him racist at that age.
If the fleeing suspect was an elderly woman, she might not be strong enough to turn wheel quickly enough.
Uh... what?
How often do the police have to pursue elderly women in a high-speed car chase?
Great anecdote, thanks. There are far more of that kind of person in the world, than there are otherwise. And many of them are intelligent, hardworking people -- but totally unaware of the possibilities of the Internet (for good or bad). There's already one reply to your message indicating that your acquaintance is a moron and should be sterilized for the good of humanity, but that's exactly the kind of rhetoric that will discount us. No, he's not a moron. He just has a zillion other things to worry about. We need to have simple explanations that non-Slashdotters can understand.